"You're looking well if tired," Aubrey added gauchely, as if he had forgotten his own self-assurance in Gant's presence.
Interesting, Marian thought. Intriguing. It was, in a strange way, rather like being shown Daddy's medals as a girl, romantic and also a potent reminder that her father had a past that stretched back for years before her birth. This was Aubreys equally real past, personified by this confident American in his weekend clothes.
Aubrey studied Gant. It was as if the man rendered what had been, for Aubrey, a dispassionate debate into something altogether more interesting. He shook the thought aside. The sense of his professional life was uncomfortable, like a waistcoat become too tight or old-fashioned.
"I need your advice your expertise," Gant said. His shrug indicated an awareness of Marian as an intruder. Aubrey knew Gant required his peculiar skills. In connection with the Vance airliner, its spectacular failure, Vance's subsequent death…?
"Marian is not an outsider, Mitchell."
Gant glanced at her, then nodded.
"OK. I it's this…" He drew something from the pocket of his jacket. Aubrey realised how dishevelled Gant's clothing appeared, stained and crumpled.
"Is it genuine?" He passed the folded piece of card to Aubrey, who immediately admitted surprise.
"Yes, I think it is." EdouardSt. Cloud, DST.
"How did you come by it?" He handed the card to Giles, who nodded his agreement. Marian leant forward in her chair.
"Oslo. I went looking for a guy I found him. Part of a team. They weren't waiting for me, but they found me fast enough."
"Does this involve Vance Aircraft?"
Gant nodded. The second 494 to crash was serviced overnight in Oslo.
There was a guy there who claimed Vance sent him, after the first crash, after Alan and I—" Again, he shrugged. Then he looked up bleakly.
"I need to know why the French security service is involved in this."
"What was their interest?" Aubrey asked.
Mrs. Grey brought the refreshed cafetiere, another Crown Derby cup. In an exaggerated politeness, Gant stood up. Mrs.
Grey at once warmed to him, poured him coffee. When she had gone, Gant said:
"Hostile action. They tried to take me out."
"Why?" There was a tremor of excitement in Aubrey's voice. It was another moment like that on the terrace at Uffingham, or when he had discovered Marian in the hall of the house, having overheard David.
Marian's moral outrage, Gant's intrusion, even Giles' protective fluttering, all like breezes exciting the calm lake of his old age.
"It was sabotage each time," Gant announced.
Aubrey heard Marian's easy, immediate shock in her breathing and the rumble of Giles' disbelief. For himself, the past had bullied its way in.
"You're certain of this?" he said.
"Yes."
"And you know who?" Aubrey blurted, realising an angry excitement about Gant.
"A guy called Strickland. Former Company man. It's his career. I recognised him on videotape they have it now, I guess. I didn't retrieve it."
"You mean' Marian burst out "Alan Vance was the victim of sabotage, that someone employed this man Strickland to make certain the 494 was a disaster?"
Her eyes were drug-bright.
That's about the size of it."
"Who?"
"I don't have the answer. French security is protecting Strickland in some way. It's a cover-up."
"Kenneth!" she exclaimed.
"Kenneth…?" Her voice tailed away into sombre reflection. Her hands were agitated in her lap, amid the huge flowers of her full skirt.
"Wait, Marian, wait," he urged.
"Mitchell tell us what happened to the first aircraft, then to you…
Please. Take your time."
As Gant's brief narrative concluded, Giles was the first to speak.
"You're certain of everything you've told us?"
"I am, General. Burton wants me to follow up, but I don't think it's anything but polite interest. He doesn't want to know what's really going on—"
"Do we?" Aubrey asked sharply.
"Not you, Mitchell, not you we three?" Gant's sense of wrong was primitive. His motive had been evident in the way he spoke of Vance, or perhaps more accurately, of his aircraft and his ambition. But this
…?
He was afraid of Marian's keen intuition. It was much like his own.
Would it lead her to—?
"You think this effort to discredit ruin the Vance 494 originates in Europe, don't you, Major?"
"I'm not sure. Does the French security service freelance, sir?"
"Infrequently," Aubrey admitted.
"Kenneth stop dragging your feet," Marian said, her brow creased, her eyes staring at the carpet as if reading some hieroglyphic text. Her hands made small, decisive chopping motions as she spoke. The two things have to fit together. The consequences of what the major has discovered have been of the greatest benefit to Aero UK, to David."
Gant's attention was hungry, fixed.
"No, don't interrupt me Tim Burton has been won over, Skyliner is on the brink of worldwide acceptance when it was a dead duck only a couple of weeks ago. Aero UK flourishes, when a fortnight ago it was about to collapse." She looked up, her eyes hot. Two plane crashes have made all the difference in the world!"
"You mean you know—?" Gant began. Marian nodded, but Aubrey protested.
"We know absolutely nothing, Mitchell nothing!"
"Kenneth, that's just obfuscation—"
"Marian, you're letting your imagination run away with you," Giles warned. He glimpsed the realities, but they made him only more determined to avoid them for his daughter's sake.
"Am I? Well, Kenneth, am I?" she challenged.
"We know Aero UK has been kept afloat by fraud. Perhaps it needed murder to make certain of the eventual outcome!"
"You're talking about business rivalry, not some vendetta!" Giles objected angrily.
This is all nonsense."
"Well, Kenneth?" she asked again. Aubrey merely shook his head. He appeared old, somehow uncomprehending, and her disappointment with him was mirrored in Gant's expression. She added: They killed Michael Lloyd for the sake of his silence. What would a few aircrew and some passengers all total strangers matter?"
To Marian, Aubrey's complacency seemed little more than slowness of mind, her father's defensive tactics and dismissal of what was so glaringly obvious merely tiresome; even Gant was no more than a messenger bringing confirmation of her own insight. The French security service was involved because of BalzacStendhal, obviously. The sabotage had been a kind of violent asset-stripping, a dawn raid with real weapons. She fumbled her cigarettes from her handbag and lit one, puffing furiously, waving her hands as she continued to berate the men in the room.
There are just too many coincidences, too many common factors. There's Fraser and the death of Michael there's my lucky escape there's Tim Burton changing sides, if you like the two sabotaged 494s the attempt on the major's life everything! If you can't see that it all forms one design, not two, then you're being wilfully complacent, Kenneth!"
The silence that followed was charged. Aubrey dissembled, she realised, in maintaining his lack of expression. Her father's nervousness was apparent, an admission that he agreed with her and was afraid of the consequences of the truth.
Gant asked:
"Can you explain what's the problem over here?"
Leaning intently forward, Marian jabbed her cigarette in his direction in accompaniment to her hurried explanation. She felt her cheeks flush, her body quiver with her unsuppressed anger. She had been right all along! David had planned this, he had employed a professional saboteur to remove the rival to Skyliner. Following the collapse of the helicopter project, it had been ever more urgent that he display some kind of success. He had had to bring down a second494 to make certain.